Finally got enough of the armor done to be able to slap it all on my colleague and have it look somewhat proportional. Striking an action pose as needed.
Won’t be a large post this time around; we worked hard today and got plenty done but there isn’t much in the work-in-progress and documentation part. Less pictures~
Work today was very messy and somewhat rage-inducing someway through. Kind of felt like giving up halfway, given the mess that was the legs and whatnot. Miscalculations resulted in so much wasted resources and energy…
The calves and lower legs were a pain in the buttocks to engineer, in that we needed it to be stable on the lower leg but also come off easily.
At first we wanted to do Velcro tabs (as shown above) and have the front piece of the leg armor just sandwich on, but that didn’t quite work out…
To attach the cut pieces of Velcro we would’ve needed to put them on somehow without tape. After trying super glue and Tacky glue (neither of which hailed any results) we decided to abandon that method.
Kinda resulted in wasted Velcro since we tossed the useless glued pieces.
Strangely though, the super glue and Tacky glue mixed together formed a strong concoction that almost held…
Designing these and trying to work out a way to have it be removable and at the same time look proportionate on the legs wasn’t a fun task…
So facing this problem, what do?
After the initial frustration that came with failing the first method, I suggested that we just go with the same method that we used on the thigh armors, shown in Phase 4.
The Velcro latch method is simple and stable, much more so than what we tried before. The only drawback is that it’s less cosmetically pleasing, as the latches are on the outside of the armor and can be seen.
Not gonna lie though, it looks pretty cool, especially when one is suiting up or taking it off. Kinda reminiscent of Iron Man’s armor and the Suit Up Gantry.
Took the other knee armor that I taped together today and had some fun with it. Don’t judge, I’m fabulous~
Also single-handedly designed and made the collar piece for the torso. I decided to go the extra mile and make it extra 3-D…had some bumps along the way and some issues making the neck hole the correct size but overall it worked…
The torso is pretty much all finished; some little things we also did today was add black to the inside of the shoulder pads, making it look a little more professional, in addition to finalizing the vents.
Not gonna lie though, I’m not particularly proud of my work with the vents. They seemed too squished together at the top of the chest opening, leaving a larger gap at the bottom. But at this point we couldn’t be damned to go back and fix it…acceptable losses.
So at the end of the day, we went ahead and attached the last Velcro pieces to the torso bloc and tried the whole thing on.
Needless to say, it’s far from finished, with the backpack, head, feet, and possible extra accessories to work on. Not to mention painting and finalizing the legs with attaching the knee armor…
Hey baby, need some help with that bazooka shaft…?
The entire waist section has yet to be attached because we need more Velcro for that. The plan is to have Velcro pieces loop through my comrade’s belt and be easily removable, just like the rest of the suit.
Just realized in the above picture you can see my colleague’s crotch armor falling off. Scantly.
Overall, very good progress, and very gratifying to finally see it all put together and actually wearable on my comrade.
Can’t foresee that many stability issues at this point, but it’ll have to stand up to several days at the convention so some more changes will be made to make sure that happens.
Read on the rest of the build:
